Three Hands Clapping? It's a Megasound
When Bad Bad Hats Bare Their Party Nails
What is a Megasound? Well, it’s pretty new, so it remains somewhat undefined. On some level it’s an artistic-meet-cute nostalgic for a less Balkanized cultural moment, when music could still be sexy and shallow without being reality television.
It’s You’ve Got Mail set to indie rock, a modem to another time – two disastrous Warner Brothers deals ago – but nonetheless two timeless truths still held sway: More hands make lighter work, and the joy of the work is in the people you do it with. Just ask Little Marco.
This isn’t to suggest Megasound’s musical union of Party Nails’ Elena Carroll and Bad Bad Hats’ Chris Hoge and Kerry Alexander drowns their passions in a sonic kiddie pool. It’s more that the dozen songs on the trio’s eponymous August 7th debut LP for Don Giovanni Records, move in an array of familiar ways, harking back to radio songs from two decades ago.
“We were all very inspired by early 2000s rock music, so that was our touchstone,” explains Alexander, who found Megasound presented differently, like a new neighbor, gradually growing familiar. “As I was writing songs, it was becoming more and more obvious. Like, ‘this would be a good one for Megasound, 'cause it just has that energy Megasound was starting to represent.’”
It’s the energy you hear on tracks like the “Lemon Peel” with its echoes of ‘90s grunge-pop girl-led bands like the Breeders, Julianna Hatfield, Veruca Salt and Bettie Serveert, the pulsing garage-rock vamp “Supersize” which sounds like Jet and Franz Ferdinand procreated, or the raw, slinky, existential narrative strut of “Speck of Dust” which could be Hamell on Trial channeling Cake.
The idea for the partnership was sparked in 2022 when Bad Bad Hats invited Carroll on stage to join them in a cover of an Adam Schlesinger (Fountains of Wayne) track from the movie adaptation of Josie & the Pussycats, “Pretend to Be Nice,” which was a regular Bad Bad Hats set-closer for years. The chemistry of that performance outlasted the evening.
“Bad Hats were pretty consistently on tour since that moment, and years later we were in my living room and Kerry was just like, ‘What if we had a band like that where you were the singer and we were the band? What about that, that sounds like that could be fun,’” recalls Carroll. “I remember thinking like, waiting my whole life for this moment." And Kerry likes to tell the story, as I actually took out my calendar and we planned the day right there.”
Carroll has known for a long time that she wanted to become a musician. Indeed, growing up in little Chatham, New York she’d deeply question every musician she met, “Tell me what you know, I wanna be a real musician someday.” She’s been writing songs since she was 10, and has been bound for the stage ever since, eventually releasing 2018’s debut full-length Past Lives and Paychecks after several 7”/EPs, blending indie pop, rock and electronic music.
Bad Bad Hats kicked off in 2012 with self-released Grow Up EP and followed in 2015 with LP Psychic Reader. Alexander grew up in Birmingham, AL for much of her life, and was an off-beat arts/theatre kid, who was always comfortable in the spotlight. Music was an outgrowth of that. Indeed, she grew up mostly listening to boy bands, and never attended an indie rock concert until college in Minnesota. But when she did start making music, she demonstrated a gift for transposing pop tropes into her new indie environs.
“I was a ham, so I wanted all the lead parts in the plays, but they were always musicals, and so I'd always audition and I wouldn't get the part,” Alexander recalls. “It was like, instilled in me that I couldn’t sing. But I was loving writing songs, and so eventually it was like finding my voice in high school to sing the songs that I had written. So by the time I got to college, I was feeling more comfortable certainly with my singing voice and was seeming to was people were liking what I was doing.”
It was while she was studying abroad for a semester in Paris that she first met Carroll, in 2011 before either had started their musical careers. “I became friends with this woman who, in my program, who happened to be a childhood friend of Elena's,” Alexander recalls.
“It predates Bad Bad Hats publicly, but Kerry was showing me and our mutual friend, whose name is Karina, the beginnings of Bad Hats. I have always written, ever since I was a kid, just like Kerry, so I had a lot of stuff to show her too,” says Carroll. “We'd both been kid unprofessional musicians, open mic girl with a guitar on a stool and playing on Garage Band kind of energy.”
Given that the band was hatched four years ago, you’d be right to assume it had a somewhat circuitous process. While they initially thought they’d do a lot of work online on zoom and what-not, but that simply wasn’t the case. Mostly a musician’s life is busy… until it’s not. There’s not much in-between.
“When you're touring and recording and shit like Bad Hats especially,” explains Carroll, “you're either available or you're not. We're just gonna make use of some of this available time, and we'll get done what we get done.”
So Carroll made some visits to Minnesota, and Bad Bad Hats got some work done when they’d tour California, and mostly it got done face-to-face. There’s just no substitute for a human presence. “It ended up just being so much more productive to just be in real life,” said Carroll.
An added push came in the form of an opportunity to open for Letters to Cleo.
“We like had to play a longer set than we'd ever played before. So Elena was just hold on I've got these two songs,” Alexander says. "We're like, ‘Okay, great. We're gonna figure out the arrangement and here we go."
“One I had truly written that night or the day before while I was driving. Literally wrote it while I was driving,” Carroll laughs. “We were like, ‘Alright. That's a song now.’ So it's been slow and fast, at different points.”
Hoge was a secret-weapon, powering through large swaths of basic tracking and production so Kerry and Elena could concentrate on the songs.
“There was a lot of cooking that Chris would do on his own… the tale of that would always be like, ‘Okay, so here's the meat and potatoes, but what's the solo going to sound like?’” says Alexander. “Things like transitions always happen later because you're able to zoom back and think about the energy of the whole, almost as if the song were a movie.
“We were like, ‘Okay, so I'm watching this movie, and at this point I'm actually getting a little confused or I'm losing interest or something.’ So we'd all say ‘we better add a swoosh there,’ or we better add a hey, or we better add an ‘ah,’ Whatever we could think of,” she continued. “Pretty much as soon as it's listenable, we record something so that we can begin to judge it and make choices. So we try to find the key and the tempo as quickly as possible.”
Hard to argue with success. Carroll’s delivery keenly negotiates Hoge’s perky rhythms, offering a vibrant focal point for what amount to high-energy party jams, even if the lyrics aren’t necessarily that frivolous. Indeed, it isn’t only the driving rhythms pumping you up, as indicated by tracks such as the aspirational “Keep on Running,” and the bright confessional indie-pop, “Now Is All We Got,” where Carroll, shrugs “What can I do?” but make the most of what we’re given.
That’s certainly the case for Megasound, who found an answer they didn’t necessarily know they were looking for in each other. Or maybe they did, it just took a minute to manifest.
“Being a solo artist is a really lonely world. You have to code switch, and there's so much flexibility required of you, which is all stuff that I really enjoy doing. But the experience of sharing a vision and really being able to be part of a family in that way of sharing everything and building everything together,” Carroll confesses.
“We didn't start Megasound with a pile of money or anything. We just were really able to kinda show up with this awareness and mutual respect for who we were, and excitement to navigate the joys and the challenges of what that would mean together,” she says. “It’s so thrilling to channel everyone's energy through the vessel of my body on stage rather than just my own.”
For Kerry, she’s still writing songs like with Bad Bad Hats, but the added pair of shoulders is a nice accessory, but really, it’s like that old saying, music is the family we made along the way.
“From the start music was always a very strong and easy tether between us. We couldn’t help but talk about it,” Alexander says. “Getting the chance, to have Elena on stage on that tour when we were touring together, it just made a reality in that moment and it manifested to be on stage with her. That's when I knew that if I tried really hard, I could make this my reality for a long time. So we are.”
Megasound CD Release Party with Agnes Uncaged, Fri, Aug 14, Turf Club
